Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

More Can Be Said A flowing, funning dance of both sacred and profane, both living and dying, both immanence and transcendence, both depth and breadth, both inner and outer, both male and female, both concrete and abstract, is how Jesus characterized the Kingdom in the Gospel of St. Thomas. Steindl-Rast, 1984 Buzz O’Connell

From A Dot-Connection Collection Not Everyone has given up on indie, however. As a character in the online comic strip Cat and Girl noted, "Imperfect is the new desirable!" the latest tactic involves a return to the "rougher sounds and images" described by Shields, despite technology that can autotune or auto correct your deficiencies. "We live in a time of ragged edges," proclaims the friend of Girl. Or, as Marginally Mediocre Blogger Tully Mills (who is actually quite a good Blogger despite the name of his blog) asked in March of this year, "Why does my generation try to make everything look like it's straight out of one of my Dad's shitty photo albums from the '70s?" While our comic strip heroine Girl agrees ("Not everything needs a poorly silk-screened drawing of a bird on it") her friend gets the last word: "If you need me I will be listening to tape hiss in my room." Indie Won. Now What? Ryan Bigge...

Heretick Talk vs Tick-Tock Too long have I longed and looked into the distance. Too long have I belonged to loneliness;  thus I have forgotten how to be silent. Mouth have I become through and through, and the roaring of a stream from towering cliffs:  I want to plunge my speech down into the valleys. Let the river of my love plunge where there is no way! How could a river fail to find its way to the sea? Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

Epinarrative Conspiracy nut, leftist, madman. These are terms of dismissal so you don’t have to listen to the argument. It would be healthier and more fun to hear what someone has to say. Oliver Stone  Our hope of salvation lies in our being surprised by the other. Ivan Illich

Sedulously Seeking He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. Henry Thoreau, Walking

Tongue-Tail Party for Wise Wags The bottom of the mind is paved with crossroads. Paul Valéry Sure you can listen intoxicated. Or lace up the boots, put in the earbuds, take the dog, and walk this talk.

Hors D'oeuvres For The Turning Table Quite simply, to approach any utterance as if its meaning is separable from its presentation is to disallow art in every positive sense of that word. It is to strip away the individuation that might make a work a new witness, and it is to violate the bond of reader and writer. The essence of our art lies in creating a lingering dream, good or bad, that other souls can enter. Dreaming one's soul into another's is an urgent business of the human mind: the dreaming itself, not whatever agenda can supposedly be extracted from it. As art, it plays on the nerves and senses like a dream. It unfolds over time like a dream. It makes its own often disturbing and often inexplicable appeal to memory and emotion, creating itself again in the consciousness of the reader or hearer. from On "Beauty" By Marilynne Robinson From Tin House Pushcart Prize XXXVII Best Of The Small Presses